GREC Racist Incidents Monitoring and Analysis Programme

Introduction

One of the recommendations of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry is to create a comprehensive system of reporting and recording of all racist incidents and crimes and for information to be exchanged through multi-agency co-operation.

GREC participates in 4 multi-agency racist incidents monitoring partnerships and has the responsibility of recording racist incidents and presenting quarterly reports to the other partners. GREC has been collecting racist incident data since 2002 and, initially, recorded the details on an Excel spreadsheet. This is a satisfactory approach for a few hundred incidents but rapidly leads to unmanageable data handling problems as numbers expand.

Having searched the market for off-the-shelf solutions GREC took a decision to write a new programme both as a labour saving device and as a tool to identify trends and patterns of racist incidents. The new programme is provisionally named “ScotRIMP” which is an acronym for “Scottish Racist Incidents Monitoring Programme”. ScotRIMP is designed to handle thousands of incidents with each incident involving one or more suspects and victims.

GREC have lead responsibility in providing reports on racist incidents which are now based on outputs from ScotRIMP. The reports are used to inform strategies for the preventing and responding to racist incidents. For instance, data is analysed using the “chart builder” tool which enables the user to correlate different categories of data e.g. age, gender and ethnicity of victim and suspect, location and time of incident.

Resources allocated to GREC’s Racist Incidents Monitoring

GREC receives funding from the 3 local authorities in Grampian, the Grampian Police and Highland Alliance for Race Equality to monitor and respond to racist incidents in the Grampian and Highlands and Islands areas. To this end GREC have set up Teamwork Against Racist Crime (TARC) which consists of one person seconded from Grampian Police on a full time basis, a Programming, Information and Statistics Specialist on a half-time basis and a paid volunteer who is responsible for data entry. The Police Secondee has a wide remit, for example, visiting schools and working with the Grampian Police to address racist incidents. The Information Specialist analyses racist incident data, prepares reports and has responsibility for all the IT aspects of monitoring.

Three years ago GREC took the decision to invest in an IT upgrade consisting of a networked server and client system running MicroSoft Small Business Server and public sector standard applications. An adequate IT office infrastructure is vital for efficient application development such as the ScotRIMP project.

Programme Design Considerations

TARC recognises that writing applications is a time consuming process and therefore sought to resolve their data management issues using Access, the standard voluntary sector database programme. This approach had to be abandoned due to the limited programming functionality of this product. Since there appears to be no suitable off-the-shelf product available GREC wrote ScotRIMP using industry standard freeware, namely Tcl/Tk, the scripting and GUI building language, and MySQL, an industry standard database engine.

ScotRIMP has been operational at GREC since the start August 2006. All the Grampian and Highlands and Islands reported incidents have been transferred from Excel into the new database using the “Bulk Data Loader” and all new incidents are input into database via the new programme. ScotRIMP is also the main tool used in the process of writing reports.

Potential Benefits and Outcomes for victims and local communities

Due to ScotRIMP’s “user-friendliness” the time taken to input data and collate data for reports has been reduced. The process of extracting tables and charts is simpler thus extending the scope of the data and the depth of the analysis which can be presented to the multi-agency partnerships. ScotRIMP has also assisted the work of our Police Secondee who finds it easier to identify clusters of incidents in specific locations or areas and to respond to requests for information pertaining to an incident. Pattern recognition is also facilitated by the use of standard bar charts and “spider plots” to correlate indicators. These outputs help inform strategic responses, for example, chart 10 below, illustrates the age and gender pattern of suspects which led to the “Perpetrators Initiative”. This project has just received funding from the Scottish Executive and involves carrying out programmatic work with young offenders who have perpetrated racially aggravated crime –see article from “the Big Issue” below.

Feedback from Users

The users in GREC believe that ScotRIMP is a major improvement in the area of data entry and extraction compared to the Excel spreadsheets. Here are some quotes:

From Denise Cromar who is a Project Scotland volunteer responsible for data input: “Adding new incidents onto the database using ScotRIMP is so much easier because you can see all the fields in a single window. It was easy to get lost with the old Excel method because the data was spread over 75 columns and even if you hid some of the columns it was difficult to avoid mixing up incidents which had to be subsequently corrected.”

From the GREC Police Secondee: “Looking for and extracting clusters of incidents which have taken place in a particular locality or time of day or where the suspect is under age or the victim is of a particular ethnic group is so much easier. Although I could do this using Excel I find the new system more flexible and I can step through the incidents and see all the detail on one page.”

From Ken MacClennan, senior Disabilities and Race Equalities Officer at Aberdeen City Council: “It is important for the Council’s Race Equalities Scheme that we have accurate and detailed data. We were particularly impressed with the neighbourhood profiles provided in GREC’s Racist Incidents Report. This is just the type of information we are looking for so we can allocate resources more efficiently”.

External evaluation

TARC have demonstrated ScotRIMP to Central Scotland Race Equality Council Ltd (CSRECL) and Central Scotland Police Force who gave favourable feedback. CSRECL would like TARC to transfer their data which currently exists on Excel into an instance of ScotRIMP suitably tailored for their use.

Here is a quote from Richard Pitts, Complainant Aid Officer at CSRECL: “This is exactly the kind of product we are looking for to reduce the time I spend inputting data into and extracting tables from our Excel spreadsheet. When can we have it?”

Other Comments

ScotRIMP integrates ease of data input and the creation of charts depicting data categories flexibly and seamlessly. It can generate tables of data and/or charts in a variety of forms, e.g. bar, column, stacked bar and column or spider plots, which help the user to identify trends and patterns at the click of a mouse button.

ScotRIMP can also generate charts relating incidents to neighbourhood areas as defined by postcode, for example, Aberdeen City Council has provided TARC with a table of approximately 5600 postcodes and corresponding neighbourhoods which number 36. These can be read into the database via the “Bulk Data Loader” and neighbourhood profiles can be output using the “Chart Builder” – see Chart 2 below.

The “Bulk Data Loader” also has the capability to import volume racist incident data in text or XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format from databases held by any other partnership areas across the country. This opens up the possibility of identifying and confirming trends and patterns of racist incidents at both at a national and regional level and thereby help to more accurately target interventions.

The appended charts which follow consist of typical outputs from the “Chart Builder” component of ScotRIMP:

Chart 1: This stacked column chart depicts the number of incidents reported by agencies per quarterly interval. This chart indicates that non-police partner agencies are not reporting incidents in the numbers which could be expected.

Chart 2a: This column chart depicts the number of incidents per 3 hour time interval in the course of the day in 8 pre-selected neighbourhoods in Aberdeen City. Whilst the large numbers of incidents taking place late at night and early in the morning in the City Centre are to be expected, further investigation of the incidents in the afternoon in Froghall and Tillydrone reveal contrasting patterns of location and ethnicity of the victims – see charts 2b and 2c. This information is useful for public sector agencies and voluntary sector organisations.

Chart 2b: Most common ethnic categories who are victims of racist incidents in selected neighbourhoods.

Chart 2c: Most common locations for racist incidents in selected neighbourhoods. Please note that “Eatery” is a restaurant or take away.

Chart 3: This column chart depicts the weekly pattern of incidents through the week using 3 hour time intervals across the Grampian region.

Chart 4: This column chart depicts the weekly pattern of incidents through the week using 3 hour time intervals across the Highlands and Islands region covered by Northern Constabulary.

Comment: The pattern of incidents in these two areas evidently contrasts, with a greater prevalence of incidents in the afternoon in the week days in Grampian compared with the Highlands and Islands. There could be various explanations for this but it should be noted the Highlands and Islands region has a significantly lower population density than Grampian and a different weight and distribution of ethnic minorities.

Chart 5: This chart is a “spider plot” and depicts differing patterns of the location of racist incidents for each of 7 pre-selected ethnic categories. The obvious feature here is the greater than average number of incidents where English people are the victim where the locum is a shop or a house whereas with Indian and Pakistani victims the locum is more frequently a restaurant or take away. Although this is to be expected, it is imperative that the patterns are identified and quantified objectively through the analysis of actual data rather than anecdotally so that resources can be accurately targeted.

Chart 6: The following 3 bar charts depict differing patterns of age and gender for different ethnic categories, namely African, English and Indian in the Grampian area.

Chart 7: as above for English.

Chart 8: as per chart 4 for Indian.

Comment: These charts indicate that African males under 10 years old are disproportionately liable to be the victims of racist incidents. Given the small number of Africans in the Grampian region this is clearly an area in need of further investigation. It is also apparent that proportionally fewer female Africans are victims which points to the need to check census data. This kind of finding leads to the targeting of training at schools (see entry 3 “Police Secondee”) and helps inform publications such as “Racist Bullying in Schools” (GREC publication reprinted in February 2005)
Chart 9: Victim age and gender profile.

Chart 10: Suspect age and gender profile.

Comment: The above chart points to the need for further analysis, for example, for all ages taken together there are 4 male for every female suspect but for the 10-15 and16-18 year categories the ration is closer to 3 to1.

Chart 11: This chart below attempts to depict the changing pattern of suspect and victim gender according to the age of the suspect. The chart is based on a total of 1123 incidents which took place across the Grampian region between 2002 and 2005.